Television - The cnn effect

By the early 1990s many people had concluded that television news
possessed formidable powers to influence the U.S. government's
foreign policy. The "CNN effect," as it is usually called,
actually has several dimensions. The first is providing a new channel of
diplomatic communication, one that allows governments to transmit
proposals or engage in dialogue, sometimes with extraordinary speed.
Officials in the Bush administration, for example, sometimes used TV to
send messages to Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait, hoping that
a public channel might increase the pressure on the Iraqi leader to accede
to U.S. demands. Government leaders, however, have long used the news
media as channels of diplomacy. Radio, for example, carried Woodrow
Wilson's Fourteen Point Address of 8 January 1918 to an
international audience.

The second dimension of the "CNN effect" is setting the
foreign policy agenda—giving certain issues urgency or importance
through news reports that capture the interest of millions of viewers and
elicit a strong response. The ability to provide live reports from almost
anywhere in the world, to transmit dramatic, emotional images, and to show
them repeatedly seems to provide television with powers that exceed the
other news media to alter the priorities that the government gives to
international issues. The third dimension is accelerating official action.
Even before the advent of CNN and other twenty-four-hour news channels,
Lloyd Cutler, a counsel to President Carter, found that TV news had led to
"foreign policy on deadline," as White House officials
hurried to take action—to make a statement, to announce a new
initiative—before the next newscast.

The final—and most controversial—dimension of the
"CNN effect" is forcing government action. George F. Kennan,
the foreign service officer who was an architect of containment during the
early Cold War, summarized this perspective in a diary entry about U.S.
intervention in Somalia in December 1992. Kennan maintained that
television pictures of starving Somali children had produced "an
emotional reaction, not a thoughtful or deliberate one," but one
strong enough to take control of foreign policy decisions from "the
responsible deliberative organs of our government."

A closer look at U.S. involvement in Somalia, however, suggests different
conclusions than Kennan's about the effects of televised images on
government policy decisions. Quantitative studies show that extensive
coverage of the famine and fighting in Somalia followed the policy
initiatives of the Bush administration in 1992 rather than preceded them.
Television coverage surely affected the views of administration officials
and gave them confidence that what they thought would be a limited,
low-risk humanitarian intervention would have considerable public support.
But television pictures of suffering Somalis did not determine the
president's decision to dispatch troops. Television had a more
decisive effect on President William Jefferson Clinton's decision
to terminate Operation Restore Hope when newscasts showed shocking tape in
early October 1993 of a crowd in Mogadishu desecrating the corpse of a
U.S. soldier who had been killed in a firefight. The U.S. casualties took
the president by surprise, and he was not prepared to appeal to angry
members of Congress for the continuation of a mission that had suddenly
grown dangerous. Instead, Clinton announced that U.S. forces would come
home by 31 March 1994.

Television showed the horrors of ethnic cleansing and civil war in Bosnia,
and those reports were influential but not decisive in shaping U.S.
government action. Scenes of Serb camps with emaciated Muslim and Croat
prisoners in August 1992 produced condemnations from the Bush
administration. Yet the president and his principal advisers were
unwilling to take military action, as they believed that there was no
clear exit strategy. Clinton, too, reacted intensely to graphic TV reports
of atrocities, such as the casualties that occurred when a mortar shell
exploded in a Sarajevo marketplace on 5 February 1994. But he followed no
consistent policy. Not until mid-1995 did the Clinton administration
approve strong measures, including continuing NATO air strikes, to bring
the Bosnian war to an end. Available evidence suggests that the president
acted to eliminate a major problem that burdened U.S. foreign policy and
that threatened his political prospects. Almost four years later, in March
1999, the United States and its NATO allies again used military force in
an air war against Yugoslavia to persuade President Slobodan Milosevic to
halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. News reports, including many on TV, of
brutality against Kosovars contributed to public support for this war. But
concern about popular reaction to potential U.S. casualties led Clinton to
rule out the use of ground troops, except for peacekeeping.

The "CNN effect" influenced U.S. interventions in Somalia,
Bosnia, and Kosovo. TV reports helped set the agenda; at times, officials
of the Bush and Clinton administrations had to react—sometimes
quickly—to events that dominated the newscasts. But the "CNN
effect" was variable, and it was only one of many factors in the
process of formulating foreign policy.